Amish Men Get 15 Years for Cutting Beards

"If somebody needs to be blamed for this, and I'm a cult leader, I'm willing to take the blame for everybody," Sam Mullet said today in court, as he awaited a sentencing for him and 15 of his co-defendants. The judge had found them all guilty of conspiring and performing a federal hate crime for cutting the beards and hair of their fellow Amish. Mullet, a separatist bishop, and the others faced life sentences and a prosecutorial recommendation of, at minimum, over 17 years. But despite Mullet's plea, the judge still gave Mullet and the others 15 years in prison.

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This is a story that is just waiting for David Chase to come along and make this his next Sopranos. Mullet, a tall 67-year-old, formed his own Amish sect on an 800-acre farm near Bergholz, Ohio, as a reproach to the secularization and modernization of the group's traditionalist beliefs: the boom-boxes in horse-and-buggies, and the dates with sex. At the time of his arrest, about 120 others lived on the farm, too. Mullet held strict rules. His defectors and detractors called the community an authoritarian "cult" — a word, prior to Mullet's use of it today, that the defendants requested be banned from the trial, along with "splinter" and "rogue."

The label is, not in small part, because of allegations that while punishing immoral men by forcing them to live in chicken coops and reflect, Mullet would allegedly sleep with their wives (a charge that he denies). In a sentencing memorandum, two U.S. assistant attorneys wrote that his "control over the Bergholz community was — and is — absolute." The perpetrators and Mullet himself all claim that while Mullet knew of the attacks, he had no input in their planning and did not cut a single strand of hair.

The beard cutting began as a reaction in 2010, after a pair of shunned defectors sought and won custody of their grandchildren, who were also Mullet's grandchildren. But the members of Bergholz did not start by shearing the beards of the defectors. Instead, at that point, Mullet's community commenced the cutting of their own chin hair as an attempt to atone, in the eyes of God, they said, for their immoral wrongdoings.

The Amish believe that after marriage women must grow their hair and men must grow their beards, in accordance with Biblical law. The members at Bergholz interpreted cutting their own facial hair as a kind of rebirth. But it was an uncommon understanding of the act. As a professor said to The Daily, in a December story about the case based off an exclusive, rare interview with Mullet himself, "To have one's beard cut is to have one's manhood taken... It's a symbolic castration."

The shearing of people outside of Bergholz began later, in 2011, after a trimmed member of the community was accosted by his father, a defector, for his hairlessness. "If God was with you, your beard would not have been cut," The Daily reports the father saying. "If God is with me, my beard will not be cut." The son and others retaliated the rebuke. They returned to the father's home, cropping his beard and the mother's hair. From then on, members used forced cutting four other times as retribution, sometimes using shears designed for cutting horses' manes.

Mullet argued that the cuttings were a difference of opinion in faith. "It's all religion," he told a local TV station two Octobers ago. "That's why we can't figure out why the sherriff has his nose in it." His lawyers called the hate crime law unconstitutional. And more bluntly, his nephew said to the AP today, about the victims, "They got their beard back again, so what's the big deal?" But others say that if Mullet became free again, they would not be able to sleep out of fear.

Over the time Mullet has already spent imprisoned, as The Daily writes, Mullet has already "stood up to a posse of tough guys in the cafeteria, befriended a feared murderer, protected a gay inmate and charmed the thugs and gang members in his cellblock by singing traditional Amish hymns after lights-out." His fellow inmates have taken to calling him "O.G." He told The Daily, smiling, "I don't know what it means, but I guess it means something good." Right or wrong, he'll have the name a good while longer.